When Dwight David Eisenhower came back from World War II, no one knew whether he was a Republican or Democrat until he ran for president. He had spent his years as a commanding general steering clear of politics. Not so today. Starting three years ago when Iraq was in shambles, George W. Bush took political cover behind Gen. David Petraeus, who successfully redirected a misbegotten war into a counter-insurgency that worked well enough to open the way for American troop withdrawal under the next president. Now,...

In last night’s monologue, David Letterman makes a joke about avoiding award ceremonies for fear of being nabbed for sexual misconduct (as Roman Polanski was in Switzerland) and then gives a no-laughs account of being blackmailed over having affairs with women who work on his show. We are deep into media-outdoes-real-life here, in the terrain of the 1976 “Network” movie that posited a TV anchorman who goes raving mad, is exploited for ratings and then killed on-air when they drop. Letterman...

Paul B. Fay Jr., who died this week at 91, was a crony so close that John F. Kennedy appointed him Undersecretary of the Navy over the protests of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The role of Red Fay, as everyone called him, in Kennedy’s life was much more personal than political. Sons of Irish-American wealth who had met in the Navy during World War II, they bonded to the point that Fay was an usher at JFK’s wedding and later served as a “beard” at his friend’s...

The War on Terror, confusing and anxious-making as it may be, has produced one encouraging side effect in American politics: The gung-ho is gone as all sides concede the military effort in Afghanistan is a dangerous enterprise with an unknowable outcome. As President Obama goes face-to-face with General McChrystal today by tele-conference, the debate over what to do next has been a good deal less rancorous than any other in recent Washington history. “Dithering” has been the harshest...

The bar for embarrassment is so high now it’s almost out of sight for celebrities who do things that would make the rest of us die of shame. Tom DeLay, who left Congress under a cloud of Jack Abramoff corruption, is ready to sashay in sequins on “Dancing With the Stars.” Eliot Spitzer, who resigned as governor of New York for caucusing with call girls, shows up on Bill Maher’s show, pontificating about the economy alongside Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman and defending capitalism...

The newest revelation of Iran’s nuclear sneakiness echoes what happened in 1962 when the Soviets furtively put missiles into Cuba, but John F. Kennedy’s problem was a faceoff for a few days compared to the complex struggle that will play out over the coming months. Yet the key issue is the same–testing an American president’s skill and resolve by an adversary who may be interpreting a rational and measured approach as weakness. Back then, JFK faced an imminent threat to the...

One salubrious side effect of the current debate has been the emergence of an energized GOP with a new generation of original thinkers: *South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, who previously described health care as “Obama’s Waterloo” that will “break him,” now observes that the debate is putting American troops at risk in Afghanistan. He tells an interviewer that “the war in Afghanistan and our economy are our two biggest issues but he’s working on other issues such...

On Letterman Monday night, President Obama joked about his daughters’ future dates who may be stressed out over having men with guns hanging around. If he really wants to know about that, I can tell him what happened when Lynda Bird Johnson was working for me at McCalls, and I went to dinner at Trader Vic’s in New York with our company’s chairman of the board. As we were being seated, the maitre d’ whispered, “The President’s daughter is going to be at the next...

The President spoke to a contentious body of politicians today, asking them to stop bickering and start working together, and was greeted with applause. No one yelled “You lie!” The United Nations, as critics will be quick to point out, is not the US Congress, and this attitude was summed up in a UK Telegraph headline even before the speech: “The UN loves Barack Obama because he is weak.” The postmortems will follow that line. “Obama,” Fox News reports, “just...

The mental health of presidents comes to the fore with Taylor Branch’s new book about eight years of confessional conversations with Bill Clinton in the White House. In more than 70 hours-long sessions, Clinton poured out his feelings to a journalist/friend, a cathartic adventure that recalls the furtive relationship of Richard Nixon with a therapist that started before his Checkers crisis and continued through Watergate and beyond. The political revelations in Branch’s “The Clinton...

As critics taunt the President about becoming another Jimmy Carter on the economy or Bill Clinton on health care reform, an older generation is haunted by the makings of another LBJ in Afghanistan. General Stanley McChrystal’s call for more troops with the or-else warning that our mission “will likely result in failure” is an invitation to follow the Vietnam path that led to 550,000 Americans fighting and 18,000 being killed in a tribal war that ended in defeat and humiliation. LBJ...

Is Barack Obama trying to hide some innate shyness? After being on 60 Minutes almost as often as Andy Rooney and rivaling Oprah on weekday TV, the President will go for overexposure records with five Sunday talk shows tomorrow to be followed by Letterman Monday night. The All Obama All the Time blitz is meant to explain and sell health care reform to confused Americans, but it calls up that ancient resistance to argument, “Don’t bother me with facts, I’ve made up my mind.” Can...

The man who received 345,937 votes (and $11.6 million of health lobbyist donations), has overruled Barack Obama, the choice of 69,498,215 Americans, who presented his proposals to a joint session of Congress last week. President Baucus’ plan, which omits a public insurance option and other key elements favored by the occupant of the White House as well as other Congressional committees, is seen as holding together “the fragile coalition of major industry leaders and interest groups central...

Joe Wilson’s blurtout last week lit a fuse to set off a slow-motion exposure of race in the national anti-Obama rage. Today the House Black Caucus takes the lead in censuring the South Carolina Congressman with what are clearly mixed feelings about dealing publicly with an issue that seemed to have been settled by the inauguration of a “post-racial” president only a few months ago. House Majority Whip James Clyburn has refused to call the “You lie” outburst racist,...

This past weekend reflects the state of anti-Obama invective as literally countless American patriots in Washington rage against the President while the dean of terrorists delivers a mild harangue against him as “powerless.” In both cases, there are fact-check problems. The bin Laden message comes in a ten-minute audiotape with an undated photograph while the Tea Party crowd, estimated at tens of thousands by neutral observers, swells to two million in the reports of sponsors and right-wing...

Today is a reminder for those who live where feeling safe is commonplace of what it’s like suddenly to live with fear, to have the ground stop feeling solid under your feet. Older generations experienced this epiphany in 1941 with Pearl Harbor. Their children were baptized by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now a new generation tells Peggy Noonan how they were transformed by the “life-splitting event” of eight years ago: “Before it they were carefree, after they were careful. A...

If passion, eloquence and moral gravity were the main currency of American politics, Barack Obama would have changed the course of the health care debate tonight. But with Washington as it is, the President could hope for no more than to restore some sanity by calling out the opposition for its “scare tactics,” indicting insurance companies for greed and evoking the “large-heartedness” of Ted Kennedy’s efforts for universal coverage as “not a Republican or a Democratic...

In tonight’s confrontation with Congress, Barack Obama will not be sweet-talking Republicans, who are locked into a long-term temper tantrum, but Democrats and independents who embraced him last November and expected to live happily ever after. Maureen Dowd, as usual, puts it in quasi-sexual terms, complaining that she “always knew he was going to be trouble…He was going to be the kind of guy who whipped you up and then, when you were all excited, left you flat, and then, when you...

To balance the furor over bureaucratic boards to decide whether the aged are worth saving with medical care, the financial wizards who brought on the mortgage meltdown have figured out a way to play roulette with their chances. Bankers, the New York Times reports, “plan to buy ‘life settlements,’ life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash–$400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to...

Previous generations marked the holiday with parades, speeches and editorials honoring the dignity of work. Today’s theme is despair over failure to find jobs. “Labor Day 2009 is a terrible time to be an American worker,” writes Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson. “Official unemployment hovers just under 10 percent, its highest level since the early 1980s. Add in the partly employed and those who have given up on hunting for jobs because there are so few jobs to be...

Embattled as he now is, Barack Obama has not lost his rhetorical touch. In today’s weekly address, he uses the fourth anniversary of the Gulf hurricane as an image for American efforts to repair the economy, reform health care and overcome political division. “Government,” he says, “must be a partner–not an opponent-–in getting things done.” His description of hands-on efforts to rebuild New Orleans comes against a backdrop of devastation in Washington as bipartisan...

Yes, no, maybe, depending on the beholder’s politics, economic theories and selective reading of the meager statistics and evidence available. Vice-President Biden speechified yesterday that, after 200 days, the $787 billion stimulus, although not a “single silver bullet” but “silver buckshot,” was helping the economy. “Without it we’d be in much deeper trouble,” he said, claiming that “Instead of talking about the beginning of a depression, we are talking about the end...

“Atonement is a process that never ends,” Ted Kennedy writes in his memoir, confronting the shame shadowing his life that was avoided in a weekend of tributes–the death of a young woman at Chappaquiddick. In a preview of the 532-page volume to be published later this month, the New York Times discloses that Kennedy “called his behavior after the 1969 car accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne ‘inexcusable’ and said the events might have shortened the life of his ailing...

The President is finally getting bipartisanship, not on health care, but against a war that has morphed into Iraq II as George Will, no bleeding heart liberal, now says it’s “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.” With calls for more troops and casualties rising, American abhorrence of an endless bloody occupation is coalescing into a demand for rethinking exactly what we are doing in that part of the world, why and for how long. Even advocates for staying like Andrew Cordesman concede...

When John McCain chose her as his running mate, she was virtually unknown. Now, twelve months later, Sarah Palin is sifting through more than 1070 invitations for paid appearances and speeches as well as a thick folder of offers for “network and pundit gigs, documentaries and business opportunities.” This makes her one of the 21st century’s first publicity saints, a status I once explained to Marilyn Monroe. “Why,” she had asked, “do they print things about me...